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In front of me, Danny begins to set up a chess board. “He sounds stressed out his mind.”
“Maybe I should go after him,” I say, partly out of concern for Rory, but also because the last thing I want for breakfast is to be whooped at chess by Danny.
“We’re comin’ up tae the end o’ October,” Finlay points out suddenly, and the other chiefs make a soft noise of realization.
“October?” I ask, wondering how I can still possibly be left out of so many little intricacies when I’ve been by their side for months now. Statues, stones, lochs, October…
“The ritual,” Luke says in a gentle voice. “He’s worried about the ritual.”
My eyes flash across to Finlay. Not this. Not this again. “But the ritual—”
Bodies hanging from trees. Teenagers having sex in a lake. What do they have in common?
Rituals. Rory said they’re rituals.
“He doesn’t still believe…” I swallow, looking at Finlay. “Does he?”
“It’s his land, his school. The fact it has pagan roots is somethin’ he’s always been obsessed wi’, and it’s no’ like ye can disprove a negative.”
“We have detention on Hallowe’en, anyway,” I point out in a practical tone, because all this talk of rituals gives me the creeps. It’s not like Rory had been the one to stumble through the trees in utter darkness, gazing around at rictus grinning faces. It’s not like he’d seen animals torn in two, by Benji, as a mockery of the very ritual Rory holds so dearly.
Deposit a stone into the loch. Lochkelvin stone into Lochkelvin water. That’s all I’d had to do. And because I hadn’t — well, is the past year of political chaos because of me? All of it? Is that what Rory genuinely believes?
Before I know it, and to Danny’s delight, I’m pushing a pawn forward. Rituals don’t mean anything. I’m almost positive about it. The only thing that makes me hesitate is the fact that yes, this is a creepy-ass place where ritualsfeellike they could theoretically be true, and that, yes, the past year has been a whirl of utter fucking unprecedented chaos. But we’re still here, aren’t we? Even Luke? Still having breakfast, still playing chess. The wider world may be a disaster, but its effect on Lochkelvin has been kept to a relatively blissful minimum.
A pawn slips out my fingers.
Unless…
Unless that had been the point all along.
No.
Rituals don’t exist.
But —theoretically… I glance across to Finlay. “The ritual at Hallowe’en — or Samhain, or whatever. The one Rory cares about so much. It’s for… what, exactly?”
Finlay raises his head from the newspaper, looking like he’d rather not waste any more time discussing Rory’s esoteric beliefs. “Protection,” he says, sounding faintly embarrassed, and my heart gives a worried lurch. “It’s supposed to benefit Lochkelvin students past and present.”
“If you touch it, you have to move it,” Danny says helpfully, and for a moment I don’t know what he’s talking about. He nods down at the fallen pawn. “You still need to play that piece.”
“Does the ritual only last a year, then?” I ask in as casual a tone as I can manage, returning the pawn to the board.
“Well, since it happens every Samhain, I guess so.”
Fraying. Tapestries fraying.
I shake my head, wondering where this thought had come from. But maybe, maybe… Giving Rory the benefit of the doubt, what if the protection ritualhadworked last year? What if, somehow, I’d been successful without realizing? And what if, now, with days to go before Hallowe’en, it’s coming undone? Fraying at the edges?
Could it be? Really?
But then, something doesn’t have tobefor it to be believed in. It just has to be assumed so.
I mull this over as I bring my queen into the game.
Besides, how does one measure protectiveness? That we’re all alive and remarkably okay? Barring a few bruised egos and cuts, we’re healthy and whole…
On the other hand, Lochkelvindoesfeel like an anomaly, the eerily calm eye of the storm. And only recently, as Antiro’s power builds, has it begun to impinge upon life here.
